Guillaume de Machaut

Guillaume de Machaut:

see Machaut, Guillaume deMachaut, Guillaume de, c.1300–1377, French poet and composer. Variants of his name include Machault, de Machaudio, and de Mascaudio. He studied theology and took holy orders. In the service of King John of Bohemia he traveled through Europe on chivalric expeditions......Click the link for more information..

Machaut, Guillaume de

(gēyōm` də mäshō`), c.1300–1377, French poet and composer. Variants of his name include Machault, de Machaudio, and de Mascaudio. He studied theology and took holy orders. In the service of King John of Bohemia he traveled through Europe on chivalric expeditions. Later, while in the service of King Charles of Navarre, he wrote the long narrative poems Confort d'ami and Le Jugement du roi de Navarre. The recipient of numerous papal benefices, Machaut was canon at Reims from 1340 until his death. In Le Livre du voir dit (1361–65) he wrote a long poem of courtly love with musical interpolations. Considered the greatest French musician of the 14th cent. and the exponent of ars nova style in France, he wrote lais, motets, ballads, rondeaux, virelais, and one mass. He contributed to the secularization of the motet by using French texts of courtly love instead of Latin liturgy. Most important perhaps was his skillful use of rhythm with counterpoint, which made his music widely known and admired. His mass, the first complete polyphonic version, was still in use in the 16th cent. and led to the great masses of Josquin DesprezJosquin Desprez or Des Prés, c.1440–1521, Flemish composer, b. Hainaut, regarded by his contemporaries as the greatest of his age. Luther spoke highly of Desprez, who may have instructed Erasmus in music......Click the link for more information. and PalestrinaPalestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, c.1525–1594, Italian composer whose family name was Pierluigi; b. Palestrina, from which he took his name. Palestrina represents with Lasso the culmination of Renaissance music......Click the link for more information..

Bibliography

See analytical biography by E. E. Leach (2011).

Guillaume de Machaut

(also known by the Latin name Guillelmus de Mascandio). Born circa 1300 in Machaut, Ardennes; died 1377. French poet and composer.

Guillaume de Machaut founded a school of rhetoric and canonized poetic forms for 14th-century French poetry. His poetic works are linked to the growth of urban culture and Scholasticism. His best work is A Book About Something That Really Happened (1365), a novel in verse with inserted prose letters about the love of an elderly poet for a young girl. His other works include the narrative poem The Court of the King of Navarre (1349), the rhymed chronicle The Seizure of Alexandria (c. 1370), and the narrative poem Pastoral Times, which contains a description of 14th-century musical instruments. Guillaume de Machaut was a representative of Ars nova (new art), a progressive trend in early Renaissance music. He composed church music (motets, the first mass in the history of music) and created numerous songs (virelays, ballades, rondos) with instrumental accompaniments that combined the musical poetic tradition of the trouvères with the new polyphonic art.

Focusing on Guillaume de Deguileville, Guillaume de Machaut, and Jean Froissart (each of whom composed scenes in which they appear on trial before God), "Eschatological Subjects" contributes important new insights on the complex "trial process" of later medieval literature, in which poetic authority and fame depended on the poet's ability to defend himself before a fearful court of reader opinion.

Here, the combination of organ (Fairs) and brass, with players placed individually around the hall, gave Roberts' colouristic exploration of themes by Guillaume de Machaut a fractured, surround-sound effect that, although modest in scope, was totally fascinating.

The ensemble, with six male and four female voices, is dedicated to introducing modern audiences to lesser-known masterpieces of centuries past, including works of composers such as Claudio Monteverdi, Thomas Tallis and Guillaume de Machaut.

In the second essay, Deborah McGrady shows how Guillaume de Machaut, in his Fonteinne amoureuse, uses the material object of the poem to valorize commissions, which "straddle gift-economy and mercantilism" (21), and to upend the traditional patron-poet hierarchy.

It is generally known that Guillaume de Machaut, probably the greatest French poet and composer of the 14th century, worked in the service of the King of Bohemia, John of Luxemburg (1310-1346) as the king's secretary.

In the last part of this discussion of French contexts for the idea of authorship in Confessio amantis, I want to turn briefly to Gower's more immediate predecessors, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and the author of the Tresor amoureux.

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